A movement of connecting many customers such as collective housings, buildings and plants collectively via the Internet and providing various services in monitoring, control and diagnosis of facilities, which have conventionally been performed on site, remotely via a could have been becoming active. Also, with increase of old building stocks, there is a tendency of increasing the demand for replacement of electrical equipment accompanying remodeling, renovation and retrofit.
In remote monitoring, ordinarily, there are no persons in charge of managing the system on-site. It is necessary to maintain the levels of the services by performing consistently monitoring to promptly find failures and performance degradation of equipment (devices and the like) and sensors that affect the behavior of the facility, remotely at low engineering costs. Also, in construction machines, medical devices, power generation equipment using, e.g., wind power, solar power or thermal power, equipment for water treatment and plants, periodic maintenance is important in order to prevent decrease in operation rate due to occurrence of equipment malfunction. However, even though periodic maintenance is performed, the risk of the equipment going down because of a failure is unavoidable, and thus, early detection (sign detection) of abnormalities and early identification (diagnosis) of abnormal parts based on measurement data from sensors added to the equipment have been becoming important.
As facility maintenance methods, e.g., a technique that assists developing a proper replacement plan for a replacement timing according to a useful life (referred to as Technique 1) and a technique that proposes equipment improvement necessary for meeting a need, to an existing equipment (referred to as Technique 2) have been proposed so far. These techniques focus primarily on preparing an optimum equipment replacement plan for a certain point of time, and is not intended to prepare a long-term improvement plan taking, e.g., deterioration of an equipment.
Also, assumed that ways of change in deterioration and failure of equipment relative to time are provided in the form of data and/or mathematical expressions, a technique using dynamic programming (referred to as Technique 3), e.g., has been proposed as PV equipment replacement planning methods. This technique is applicable to, e.g., a plan for maintenance of a facility.
Also, as a method using sensor data and/or history data of equipment inspections that can be obtained online, there is a technique that evaluates a remaining useful life for a lithium-ion battery (referred to as Technique 4). Also, a technique that learns a possibility of deterioration and failure (abnormality degree) of equipment relative to time for a plant to estimate further progress of the abnormality degree and thereby evaluates time during which the equipment can continue operating (referred to as Technique 5) has been proposed.
The methods of Techniques 1 and 2 focus primarily on preparing an optimum equipment replacement plan for a certain point of time and are not intended to prepare a long-term improvement plan. Since many electrical equipment devices in buildings operate for a long period of time, it is necessary to, utilizing data collected from the buildings, predict change in use pattern and performance degradation states of the devices over a long period of time in consideration of the entire life cycles and prepare an improvement plan utilizing results of the prediction.
Also, a method such Technique 3, which is premised on ways of change in deterioration and failure of an equipment relative to time being provided in advance in the form of data and/or mathematical expressions, is difficult to be applied to complicated systems such as building facilities and plants in which ways of deterioration and change in failure largely vary depending on the usage of the equipment.
On the other hand, for a method using sensor data and/or history data of equipment inspections, which can be obtained online, also, the methods such as Techniques 4 and 5 require modeling by means of actual measurement of deterioration and a failure rate of an equipment relative to time according to actual inspections in past similar cases and previous tests. However, collecting a large amount of actual measurement values of deterioration and failures requires long-term observation and thus is difficult.